(Continuing off the end of the previous crumb.)
Are we then left with only two options: a wicked society or no society at all?
This impossible choice presents itself only because we insist on thinking in absolute terms. We want an arrangement that will guarantee us justice evermore—as if it were our responsibility to set a course for the rest of history. The Kantian fantasy has infected our thinking: we want all our political decisions to be worthy of becoming universal laws. But this is all contrary to the nature of the world, which is irremediably particular, in which all supposed universals are overthrown. Heraclitus is the medicine for the madness of Kant.
In our everyday actions, we show that we implicitly understand all this, for again and again we act inconsistently, according to innumerable considerations, in contradiction to our supposed principles. We call this is irrational; perhaps it is, in a narrow sense, but it is supremely reasonable.
It is in this spirit of sussing out each action according to its particular circumstances that we must approach the problem of community norms and the informal manner in which they are policed. At times the mob is right and at times it is wrong. A community that relies on formal apparatuses to regulate its relations, in which people call the cops or complain to management if they don't like their neighbors' behavior and have no other recourse but dirty looks when these formal apparatuses are out of reach—such a community is going to the dogs. But a community that resorts to lynching when it believes that someone has violated its strictest codes is also going to the dogs.
That sounds obvious-- and yet we do not seem to understand it, for we are, as a society, progressively dismantling all informal systems on the suspicion that they are prejudiced, tyrannical, unregulated and un-regulatable. This suspicion has achieved the status of a paranoia and is part of a collection of neuroses that forms a central feature of our culture.
These neuroses include our attitudes towards germs and hygiene and towards accidents, injuries, and disease, as well as towards regulation of conduct. Their ramifications include everything from our litigation system, to the insurance costs that hobble our healthcare system, to disposable coffee stirrers and plastic packaging. We might call them “the fear of contamination” or “the fear of the uncontrolled,” but I find it more revealing to think of them instead in negative terms, as an absence or a loss. Their common source is a loss of faith in the world, in its continuity, its solidity, its validity. We do not want the world with its vicissitudes, its sufferings, its calamities, its cruelties; we want the purified world of our imaginings. We want the millennium now, we want to build it ourselves.
Or rather we want it to have already arrived. We seem to believe that it ought to be here now. Hence the outrage with which people are wont to meet any imperfection however minute-- an ill-chosen phrase, an object that could under certain rare circumstances cause injury, an eating utensil not perfectly sterilized and bearing some faint mark of previous usage-- as if they did not know that the world has always been dirty and dangerous and unfair.
This faith that we lack is not necessarily a religious or a theistic one, but it is a part of what was once covered by religious faith. The prayer goes “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done”: it asks for paradise, it accepts the world. Maybe we can restore ourselves to a state of sanity with a faith in the world that makes no mention of God or Creator, but this cannot be merely a faith in the material world, inasmuch as material means measurable, verifiable. It must be a faith in qualities of the world that do not fall within our systems of knowledge. It must be truly a faith, a trust. And it must include and contain and surpass death: it must retain its meaning, its trust, even in the face of death. Otherwise, it collapses, offers us no solace, no solidity. So it may be possible to avoid the theistic element, but it will not be possible to wholly eliminate the mystical element.
With such a faith, we can be at peace and live and act within that imperfection and finitude of the world rather than formulate hopeless schemes to eliminate imperfection and to avoid finitude; we can abandon the dream of absolute judgment and settle for the partial, contingent judgment that is available to us; we can engage with realities instead of abstractions. Without such a faith, we cannot. So only by finding an apparently “mystical” faith in things as they are can we escape the blatantly fantastical dream of perfection. Again, rationalism is not reasonable.
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